Maybe he is referring to the pre-Apple OS X called NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP for Intel came out in about the 1995 timeframe. I was a NeXT developer and used NeXTSTEP on Intel for about 3 years. In those days Universal Binary was called fat-binary. NeXTSTEP ran on four platforms; NeXT, Intel, Sparc and PA-Risc (HP). You could compile your .app for all four in a quad fat-binary. Since OS X is a very close descendant of NeXTSTEP, I guess you could start the clock back then.